The Escapist Blog is a journal on the positive promotion of tabletop, pen-and-paper roleplaying games: dispelling the myths and misconceptions, educating the public about their benefits, encouraging new generations of players, and more. For more information on roleplaying advocacy, visit the Basic Gaming FAQ.

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The Escapist is 16! Posted by WJWalton on Thu 15 of Dec., 2011 05:56 PST

It's the Escapist's 16th birthday, which means that it's old enough to drive itself to the local game store now!

As I usually end up repeating every December, I'm not completely sure when I uploaded the first HTML files for "The Gaming Advocacy Website" (as it was originally called for the first six months) back in December of 1995, so I've deemed the 15th as the official anniversary of the site.

I've put together a sort of year-end recap for 2011, for the benefit of those who don't follow the site very closely (Shame! SHAAAAAME!), or may have missed some of things that the site has covered in the last 12 months.

THE STATE OF THE ESCAPIST ADDRESS

The site's 15th year saw just a couple of changes: In November, I added a new resource: The Five Ws of RPGs, a page designed for gamers to share with non-gamers to help them understand the hobby a little better, located at www.theescapist.info. I also expanded the Atlas at the Young Person's Adventure League to include a bunch of new RPGs that are great to play with kids (though I'm still trying to catch up with some of the reviews!). Tell Me About Your Character is back after a long hiatus, with two new interviews - Perrin Rynning and John Enfield and a third that will be up tomorrow. (I'd really like to see this feature keep its new momentum, so if you haven't participated, please consider doing so!)

The site joined Google+ this year - if you're on G+ too, please add it to any of your RPG circles!

The biggest news of the year was the site's nomination for ENnie and Oggie awards! It didn't win the ENnie, but landed the Golden Ogre in the Oggie Awards! In other areas of recognition - The site's 404 page was listed as one of the best on Buzzfeed, and the Dark Dungeons page got a brief mention on Wil Wheaton's blog, which is something I've been trying to get him to do for years now.

BLOG RECAP

There were a lot of great stories to cover in 2011. Here's a recap, in case you missed any of them:

Several charity and humanitarian efforts were organized by gamers this year: there was help for victims of the New Zealand earthquake, the Wayne Foundation was formed to give assistance to victims of human trafficking and child prostitution, an organization in Israel called Romach works to help troubled youth through RPGs, the Random Encounter Kindness Bundle was organized to help a fellow gamer pay her medical costs, and an RPG called Legend helped raise money for Child's Play. One very touching story covered the emotional benefits of the hobby, in which a homeless gamer found escape from his troubles by creating a GURPS steampunk campaign.

On the education front, an article from the Austin Daily Herald included a statement from a teacher who confessed to using D&D to teach gifted students in the 1980s, an interview with Language Arts teacher Larry Graykin about his educational role-playing game Diddorol, and Dr. Scott Nicholson announced an "improvisational storytelling activity" for large groups called Crossed Paths.

PARANOIA

Despite surviving the dark age of the 1980s, the roleplaying hobby still comes across the occasional resistance from a stubborn few - and sometimes, I find more relics of that era that I've never seen before, and share them in the hopes that they will make all of us less susceptible to irrational thinking.

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